War and all those things are written in the Bible as a sign that Jesus is coming soon.

I don't think Jesus is coming at all, Andrew. If there ever was such a person, he either got executed by the Romans or died an ordinary death, and is now... Well, dead. Terminally so, in fact. Just because the Bible claims that he came back to life doesn't mean that it actually happened, you know.

So when I, an atheist, stop and help someone with a car problem (which has happened quite a few times in my life) should that person thank god even though I'm an atheist? Or did the devil make me be nice? Or what?

Last winter I was one of two people helping a mutual friend get to Missoula (45 miles away) at least twice a week for her chemo treatments. The other person is mildly religious. I of course am not. So when the other person did it, should my friend have thanked god, and when I did it, thanked nobody?

Inquiring minds want to know. If I'm doing gods work, he should tell me. If I'm doing work as a friend and concerned fellow human being (which is what I assume I was doing), it would be nice to know that the credit is going to the right cause (friendship) rather than a wrong one (a non-existent god). But obviously I need your help to decipher my actions.

Is the Angelica Zambrino post the one with the video? No, I didn't watch it. You had already announced that you were gone for good and I wasn't interested anyway. Anyone can say fantastic things. I'd need to see such things in person, with Penn and Teller by my side confirming that it wasn't either magic or bullish*t.

yeah right the chances that a mechanic with the right equipment would be the second car and stop within 2 minutes of me praying for a miracle are outstanding odds. Escpecially outstanding that is that his phone would say praise God.

Alright here's another big miracle - since you don't like the small or medium ones... I brought a homeless guy into my house and he ended up inheriting over a million dollars. He now has wrote me in his will as his sole heir

Listened the first few minutes and spotted several errors wrt Islam. Most notably, praying to Muhammed is an absolute nono in Islam. Praying to anyone other than god is a concept utterly alien to Muslims.

Then I plonked his name into google ... don't know if it's shown on screen, it's spelled Nasir Siddiki.

Came across a few pages that point out even more errors.So, he might have been a cultural Muslim, but certainly not a practising one.

As for the miracle itself ... no proof other than his say so. Plus, he keeps changing his story and his story does not match up with the photographs shown.

All in all, a conman, pure and simple

Logged

2 Interwebs 7:42And in the seventh year, thou shalt cast out the Nam from thine assembly for he haveth a potty mouth.

Alright here's another big miracle - since you don't like the small or medium ones... I brought a homeless guy into my house and he ended up inheriting over a million dollars. He now has wrote me in his will as his sole heir

Matthew 19:24

And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God

yeah right the chances that a mechanic with the right equipment would be the second car and stop within 2 minutes of me praying for a miracle are outstanding odds. Escpecially outstanding that is that his phone would say praise God.

Really? How do you calculate those odds?

First point: the fact that he stopped at all, and that his phone said "praise God", are not worthy of seperate mention. Clearly from his phone he is a committed Christian, and so he would of course stop for you, knowing as he did the story of the Good Samaritan.

But one thing I don't understand - what exactly are you claiming your god DID in this instance? I can think of three possibles, though perhaps you have another in mind? I'd be grateful if you would let me know which of these you are claiming is correct.

1) God made the man stop. The most trivial of claims. The man was driving along that road entirely by coincidence. He did not intend to stop (Bad Christian! See above), but your god altered his mind and forced him to decide to stop. If this is your claim, how do you reconcile that with Free Will (assuming you believe in it)?

2) God made the man a mechanic. That man would have been driving along anyway, and would have stopped anyway.....but your god ensured that his life decisions resulted in him becoming a mechanic. This is a greater steamrollering of free will, what if he'd wanted to be a surgeon but (in order to fulfil your prayer), your god altered his mind and made him opt for the life of a mechanic? This implies that your god has no problem with taking huge swipes at a person's life and forcing them down a particular road. Are you comfortable with that?

3) God made sure the man was on that road. Wow. Now this likely requires a HUGE amount of intervention in the world. At minimum, he was forced to choose a different route to that which he would have preferred to take. But it could mean that, to ensure he took THAT route, your god had to ensure he was on his way to a call, say. Are you suggesting your god caused someone else's car to break down, in order that the machanic was driving along that road at that time?

With all the above, remember that you are claiming this was a MIRACLE, and not coincidence. For it to be a miracle, it has to have been something your god actually DID - so you cannot therefore claim that your god did NOT override that man's free will on your behalf.

And that's what I don't get - your god apparently places a huge reliance on free will and people making choices....and yet, because you are too dumb to know how to use a jack, or to carry a spare tyre, he happily overrode free will to a significant degree in order to save you some inconvenience. Is that the god that you wish to protray to us? Because is sounds like your god has huge double standards if you are.

Final thought: no matter how you cut it, your claim is that your god directly intervened in the world, rapidly and significantly, to answer your prayer. So why aren't you praying for a cure for cancer, or for an end to famine? You've shown us that god jumps when you call, so why not pray for others rather than yourself?

And if you ARE praying for those things.....can you explain why your god leaps so quickly to your aid to save you a little inconvenience, but ignores you when you ask for aid for the suffering of others?

If you REALLY want us to come around to your god, those are questions you need to answer.

yeah right the chances that a mechanic with the right equipment would be the second car and stop within 2 minutes of me praying for a miracle are outstanding odds. Escpecially outstanding that is that his phone would say praise God.

You don't understand the power of coincidence, and the power of mathematics.

Here is a little miracle you can do yourself, in your own home. Take a deck of ordinary playing cards, with jokers removed, shuffle them well and deal out all 52 cards. You can deal them face up so you can see them.

You just dealt yourself a miracle!

The number of possible deals in a deck of 52 cards is 52!, or ~8.066 times 10^67 (ten to the 67th power).

To understand how large that number is, consider this:

If there were a trillion worlds, and each world had a trillion people, and each person had a trillion computers, and each computer could deal a trillion deals a second, and the computers had started dealing 13 billion years ago (just after the Big Bang), then all that would have to exist in 197 parallel universes for all the deals in one deck of 52 cards to have been dealt.

I am not the best mathematician in the world, but with 7 billion people total and about 6 billion over ten years old, I am probably in the top 20%. That puts me somewhere in the top 1.2 billion of the top adult mathematicians in the world.

Do you see how much fun it can be to think?

The music is playing, the invitation is out. Come down the aisle and join us in the enlightenment. Leave the darkness of superstition behind. It is really bright here.

Odin, King of the Gods

PS - It would have been a miracle if the tire had fixed itself and re-inflated. Then god's angel could have done something really important, like saving a starving child in Somalia or Ethiopia. 25,000 children die each day due to lack of food, clean water, or preventable diseases. And yet you believe you rate an angel fixing your tire. That is hilarious.

I don't know. You're really sick. You're scared. You're delusional with a high fever. You have funny dreams. Then you get better.

And when you look back on it, you have profound thoughts.

Many years ago I had dental work, and they gave me that gas. I REMEMBER leaving my body and floating around the room and looking down at myself, and watching the dentist and his assistant opening their mouths and singing opera-type music. I REMEMBER it. It didn't feel like a dream. Decades later, it feels like a memory.

I was drugged. This guy was drugged. And had a high fever, and possible brain swelling. And he was in pain and scared.

Alright here's another big miracle - since you don't like the small or medium ones... I brought a homeless guy into my house and he ended up inheriting over a million dollars. He now has wrote me in his will as his sole heir

Since the story of a homeless man inheriting a million dollars would undoubtedly be printed in your local newspaper, one thing you can do to provide supporting evidence is to provide a link to the news article which undoubtedly covers this rags-to-riches story.

It won't prove it, not by itself, but that's good as a starting point.

Logged

Nullus In Verba, aka "Take nobody's word for it!" If you can't show it, then you don't know it.

yeah right the chances that a mechanic with the right equipment would be the second car...

"The right equipment"? Heeheeheeheehee! (Springy G flings open the trunk of Andrew's alleged car and tosses out a spare tire, a long-handled wrench and a jack.) Dear, sweet Uncle Loki -- If I was stranded a gazillion miles from nowhere, *I* could probably switch My own tire if I had to.

And WTF were you doing on a highway with that degree of automotive cluelessness, anyway? If I go on a road trip I generally carry a few emergency supplies in the trunk, like windshield wiper fluid, some 5/30 oil, funnels, paper towels and jumper cables. (makes mental note to pick up some fuses to add to Her kit)

Yes, please do. Otherwise, I'm going to assume that Mr. Homeless was just BSing you about inheriting a million dollars and about writing you into his will. If this story were true, why didn't he just give you some cash up front (like, say, $10,000-$20,000) as a "thank you"? (I know I would.)

Please link to a .PDF of the will and make sure that the law firm's seal and the lawyer's and witnesses' names and signatures are clearly visible. Anyone and his dog can throw together a fake will, y'know.

Here's a medium size miracle. I was driving home from church one night on the freeway and my right tire popped. I immediately began calling upon God and having absolute trust that He would help me (since I had no phone). And I kid you not the second car that passed by pulled over and happened to be a mechanic. By the time I finished using his phone (and didn't get through to anyone) he had already fixed the tire completely and when I looked at his phone the header on it was this "praise God". Who knows that might have been an angel since I know that they were all around me and following me home because I saw them and could feel them all around me.

Hah! I remember some incorrigible idiot at FRDB by the name of Self-Mutation using a similar story!

That's his first version of the story. He kept changing it (quite substantially sometimes) when everyone kept poking holes in his account. Every time others would point out he changed his story he would assert that he never did.S-M never, ever figured out what constituted evidence no matter how many time it was defined for him. Hopefully Andrew will figure out what evidence is soon.

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"In the end theologians are jealous of science, for they are aware that it has greater authority than do their own ways of finding “truth”: dogma, authority, and revelation. Science does find truth, faith does not. " - Jerry Coyne

That's nothing. One rainy night I was on my way to see a speaker who was trying to rope me into Amway. On the way, I got a flat. And the screw that held the jack and spare in the trunk was rusted solid. I had to bend the screw until it broke from fatigue loading. It took me hours. By time the spare was on, the Amway pep rally was over. Praise jesus.

Alright here's another big miracle - since you don't like the small or medium ones... I brought a homeless guy into my house and he ended up inheriting over a million dollars. He now has wrote me in his will as his sole heir

Andrew, why is it that you, who pray for trivial things like help to win a game, always get an answer, but parents with injured children do not? Why do you have help to fix your vehicle, but a cancer victim, praying to stay alive for her children does not? There is enormous suffering in the world, and many of them are devout, loving, and spiritual people, who love god. Why do they not get any of his help for their very real, and much more serious problems?

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If we ever travel thousands of light years to a planet inhabited by intelligent life, let's just make patterns in their crops and leave.

Alright here's another big miracle - since you don't like the small or medium ones... I brought a homeless guy into my house and he ended up inheriting over a million dollars. He now has wrote me in his will as his sole heir

Hah, you had me going for a bit there. I was wondering if Wayne Harropson had gone on a mushroom bender and returned to the forum. Nice bit of Poe-work. *golf clap*

You guys don't encourage these clowns. They just try to get a reaction from us. Likewise to any serious christian, please stop trying to claim everything is a miracle. You have seen dozens of times they get ripped apart by critical thinking.